Lorena Infante Lara

Research from Teru Nakagawa, professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, describes intricacies of normal brain function with implications for our understanding of brain injury and recovery: A decrease in pH can modify a neurotransmitter receptor’s structure, thereby modulating its location and kinetics. Read More

Teebro Paul, a local high school senior interning in the lab of Larry Marnett, won first and second place at two events in HOSA’s recent International Leadership Conference. This year’s event featured over 11,000 contestants. Read More

The Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences is soliciting 2024 applications for research awards from the Stanley Cohen Innovation Fund. The Cohen fund supports high-risk, ground-breaking research with the potential to open new fields of scientific inquiry and biomedical impact. Read More

Researchers from the School of Medicine Basic Sciences recently developed an analytical tool called EV Fingerprinting that could lead to the use of “liquid biopsies” as a substitute for traditional biopsies for certain patients or diseases. Read More

The Russell G. Hamilton Graduate Leadership Institute, an initiative from the Vanderbilt University Graduate School, recognized over 130 students from the School of Medicine Basic Sciences with awards during the 2023–24 academic year. Read More

Using computer-aided drug design, the labs of Heidi Hamm, Jens Meiler, and Craig Lindsley generated a novel series of biologically active compounds that can serve as a basis for anti–blood clot preventative drugs. Read More

New work by Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology Bill Tansey and colleagues has determined that a new type of inhibitor—a WINi—targets cancer cells in a novel way and suggests exploiting this pathway in future anticancer drug development efforts. Read More

Benjamin P. Brown, assistant professor of pharmacology, and colleagues in the departments of molecular physiology and biophysics, pharmacology, and chemistry, have determined that AlphaFold2 can be used to generate approximations of relative conformational preferences of proteins, which will help researchers better understand a protein’s structure and function across a range of conditions and mutational states. Read More

Ken Lau, professor of cell and developmental biology, and colleagues have laid out the principles governing the biology of early, precancerous lesions, which are different from the principles that govern cancers. Their authoritative perspective was published in Cancer Discovery in April 2024. Read More

The labs of Emily Hodges, assistant professor of biochemistry, and Tony Capra, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, have devised a method to separate the relative contributions of cis vs. trans regulatory mechanisms to gene regulatory divergence between species. Read More